Tansy's Murder Palace and Other Stories
by Tansy Rayner Roberts
This year, my cultural stashing has been all about sumptuous history, murder palaces, and pretty coats.
My family and I finally played a board game I bought myself the previous year — Rococco, which is just the prettiest and most decadent game of many moving parts. You are a tailor, and your job is to gather lace, thread and fabric to make glamorous gowns and frock coats for the grand palace ball of the year… and to hoard money and power along the way. Fiendishly complicated, but aesthetically delightful — it took us all day to play it but we had croissants and cheese to eat along the way.
Murder Palace is my new favorite genre of TV show, inspired first by The Great, a wickedly humorous take on Catherine the Great’s career and marriage, starring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult. I already loved this clever, savage comedy costume drama to bits, but when Gillian Anderson stole the show in Season 2 as Catherine’s excessively horrible mother, it went up even higher in my estimation. So much casual murder. So many pretty frocks.
I then fell down the beautiful rabbit hole that is all three seasons of Versailles… and moped for weeks afterwards at the lack of similar shows to immediately watch, until the wonderful The Serpent Queen came along to temporarily distract me.
I read a lot of history nonfiction this year. Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore by Emma Southon is a marvelously irreverent biography with a very contemporary tone, which I found to be an instant page-turner. The Five by Hallie Rubenhold just blew my mind in her rigorous research, and completely changing my perception about the Jack the Ripper murders.
Thanks to the Verity podcast, I had an opportunity to rewatch the '90s fantasy show Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman… and then inhaled all other Neverwhere content including the wonderful audio play adaptation of the novel, and the audio version of the spin-off short story “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back.” It was so nice to hear Paterson Joseph return to the role as the Marquis de Caracas.
Thanks to my newfound obsession with The Witcher, I have discovered alt-folk rock band The Amazing Devil, and completely fallen for their music. I can’t really express how rare it is for me to discover new music that I like. The songs are gorgeous and spellbinding and hilarious and snarky, with lyrics that sneak up behind you to smack you over the head. I’ve gone through all three albums like a hurricane, but can particularly recommend the most recent album Ruin.
Tansy Rayner Roberts is a writer and podcaster living in Tasmania. Find her on Twitter, Instagram and Patreon as @tansyrr. Her newsletter is packed with tea reviews, reading joy and news about her various writing and publishing projects: subscribe here: https://tinyurl.com/tansyrr
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